The Long Way Home 7.26.24 Northshore Journal

Three weeks ago, in this space, I wrote about this summer’s presidential debate featuring two grumpy old men. One of them, the 46th President, who was as white as Dicken’s ghost of Jacob Marley when he strode onstage, has removed himself from the race.

That leaves us with the 78-year-old former president Trump as the last grumpy old man standing. He says we live in a hellscape of historic proportions, which seems to exist only in his fevered mind. And only he can save us.

I shall exercise caution in my critique of the Republican candidate to avoid ending up in a Maga re-education camp in the future. 

A significant segment of our population, far from a majority, elevates the 45th President on a gold-plated pedestal. 

In true celebrity-obsessed fashion, they gush about the God-made miracle allowing his survival of a horrific but rather amateurish assassination attempt during a rally in Pennsylvania preceding the Republican National Committee's nominating convention. 

During the convention, he wore a square gauze bandage on his injured right ear, and soon, the celebrity-worshipping delegates were sporting a similar bandage on their own ear. 

Some, like the cousin I’ve silenced on the Book of Face, have tried to worship Mr. Trump. While it's true the former President is, like all politicians, a shameless self-promoter, he is not an all-powerful being or even the chosen son of an omnipotent being. 

My cousin insists Trump is persecuted by the “Deep State” because he’s so good, pure, and effective. Yes, even now. 

Another close relative believes that all of the allegations, criminal and otherwise, against 45 are simply untrue—not just unproven but untrue—all of them, including the ones with indictments and convictions. 

I’ve been aware of the man who served as our 45th president since the 1970s. I came to distrust him long ago when he was getting primarily glowing press in the business publications of the day for his real estate development projects.

Many people who worked directly for Trump in the White House years have distanced themselves from him. 

It’s terrible seeing those that Trump has profoundly and consistently humiliated in the past, like Rafael (Ted) Cruz, Marco Rubio, Ron DeSantis, and Nikki Haley, as they bend a knee, kiss his ring, and swallow whatever dignity remains to praise/endorse him.

Our founding fathers struggled to write a constitution for the United States. At the time, it was still being determined if all 13 colonies would sign on to this daring experiment. They did, and our constitution, 236 years old, is the world's longest-surviving written charter of government. 

I’m reading Thomas E. Ricks's "First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country" and learning some things that put our current political situation in context. For more than two centuries, America has operated on the principle of three co-equal branches of government. 

The founders were guided in part by Montesquieu, a French judge and political philosopher in the 18th century. Believed to be the principal source of the theory of separation of powers,

Montesquieu wrote, “Constant experience shows us, that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it. . . . To prevent this abuse, it is necessary from the very nature of things, power should be a check to power.”

John Adams, our second president, wrote, "The new Government . . . will require a Purification from our Vices, and an Augmentation of our Virtues or they will be no Blessings. The People will have unbounded Power. And the People are extreamly [sic] addicted to Corruption and Venality, as well as the Great—I am not without Apprehensions from this Quarter."

I’m old enough to have seen the power shift from one branch of government to the other and back again. I support the candidate who is most willing to accept the balance of power.